


the places we'll go

by Summerlightning



Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: Gen, Mild Crossover, Pre-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-17
Updated: 2014-02-17
Packaged: 2018-01-12 19:05:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1196094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Summerlightning/pseuds/Summerlightning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So Anna winds out the spool across the world.  She goes from Morocco to Timbuktu—to Vienna, to Berlin, to Paris and out, out, out to Boston, where Elsa tells her the harbor still tastes a little like tea.  Elsa:  she likes hearing about Anna’s adventures at dinner, made up or not, and she joins in in a way Mama and Papa never do.  Soon it’s not Anna’s game but their game, their special pastime.  “Where are we going next?” Elsa will say and it’s like they really are traveling together, crowded into a tiny coach steaming across a distant foreign countryside where it’s hot and yellow and even the windows bead up with sweat.  Or Elsa—smart, serious Elsa—will frown and scratch her chin and offer, “I don’t know if we want to visit Ayutthaya just yet, Anna.  There’s a coup in Siam.  We might get stuck.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	the places we'll go

\--

When she’s nine Anna tacks a map up on her wall, the biggest one she can find that shows the countries and the continents and all the oceans between them.  She spends hours looking at it, sometimes, tracing the little blue squiggles of rivers, the mountains drawn as dusty lumps like potatoes under gravy.  Mama sees her longing and brings her pins with the heads painted different colors.  “Stick them the places you want to visit,” says Mama, but later that night Anna asks her for more pins, and more the next day and the day after that.  Soon the map’s covered in a rainbow of dots, the castle’s empty of pins, and it’s Papa’s idea to give Anna thread instead.

“String it from pin to pin,” he tells her, handing her a full spool.  “Plan trips.  Voyages.  Then tell us about them, dear one, and we’ll all be able to imagine going together.”

So Anna winds out the spool across the world.  She goes from Morocco to Timbuktu—to Vienna, to Berlin, to Paris and out, out, out to Boston, where Elsa tells her the harbor still tastes a little like tea.  Elsa:  she likes hearing about Anna’s adventures at dinner, made up or not, and she joins in in a way Mama and Papa never do.  Soon it’s not Anna’s game but _their_ game, their special pastime.  “Where are we going next?” Elsa will say and it’s like they really are traveling together, crowded into a tiny coach steaming across a distant foreign countryside where it’s hot and yellow and even the windows bead up with sweat.  Or Elsa—smart, serious Elsa—will frown and scratch her chin and offer, “I don’t know if we want to visit Ayutthaya just yet, Anna.  There’s a coup in Siam.  We might get stuck.”

But they do take the thread to Borneo, and to Peru and Brazil, and to Benghazi.  Anna suggests riding camels in Egypt and Elsa confesses that she’s afraid, what if she falls off?  What if the camels _spit_?  Do they even do that?  (“Yes,” Mama says, “and they bite, so take care.”)  They look at the pyramids, silhouetted against the blazing blood-orange sunset.  They search the night bazaars for treasures, spices and soft carpets and pretty silk scarves.  “We could get sweet ice,” Anna says, “it’s so hot,” and she fans herself, but across the table Elsa shakes her head and says no, no ice, nothing cold.  They never do go anywhere with snow.

Mostly they talk about their thread trips at dinner, or at breakfast if Elsa’s there, because otherwise they don’t see each other much.  Elsa’s busy with lessons Anna’s not old enough for yet, sitting in on meetings with Papa—locked in her room, studying histories and antiquated treaties and reading books thicker than the snowfall outside. 

Sometimes, though, so seldom Anna learns never to hope for it, Elsa comes to Anna’s room and looks at the map on the wall with her.  She traces the paths of the pins and thread with careful fingers, hovering her hands over the parchment.  She wears gloves all the time, now.  Anna thought at first it was because Elsa wanted to copy Papa, but Elsa’s hands tremble in the small space above the thread, throwing shivery shadows on the wall, and Anna sees the shaking and realizes it’s fear keeping the gloves on, not admiration.  She remembers how Elsa asked about the camels. 

For a few imagined trips thereafter Anna tries mentioning a surplus of gloves in their luggage.  Elsa smiles at her for it, but it’s not a happy smile—it wobbles too much, weak in the middle.  Anna tells her eventually that their luggage, gloves included, gets lost in a bog deep in Louisiana.  (Eaten by alligators.)  Elsa beams.  In some small way Anna understands that Elsa’s trying to leave whatever fear she has behind, trying to separate it from the trips they take together in their heads on the thread, and she never brings up gloves again. 

But on her tenth birthday, at dinner, Papa interrupts their trek through the humid reaches of the Gambia by saying, “Anna, what if you could really go somewhere?  Would you like that?”  Of course she would.  She tells him so, and he gestures to the doorway of the dining room where a footman has her trunk on a trolley, tied up tight.  She stares.  “You’ll leave for Corona in the morning, then, on the first ship out,” Papa says.  “Your aunt and uncle hoped you would say yes.”

Papa takes trips out to Corona twice a year, once in the fall before the ice covers the fjord and once again in spring, just after the ice melts.  Mama goes with him sometimes.  He brings back chocolates for them, and little music boxes, and lanterns they light and send up into the clearest summer nights.  Anna’s been once before but she was just a baby, she doesn’t remember it, and Elsa’s told Anna all she can recall herself is that the queen, Papa’s sister, touched Elsa and little Anna like they were made of glass and cried slow, silent tears over them.  Papa’s sister had a child once, a daughter with golden hair.  But not anymore.

Corona’s supposed to be a beautiful place and Anna leaps aright, knocking back her chair—Papa’s told her about flower markets and fairs and the festival of lights, and her heart crowds up into her throat at the thought of getting to see those things, actually _see_ them.  But she looks at her trunk again.  There’s something strange about it, and after a moment she says, “Oh,” because it’s by itself, the trunk’s lonely.  She turns to her parents and says, “Aren’t you coming too?”  And then she blinks and spins and looks at her sister, who moments before was wading side by side with Anna through a grove of low green palms and broken elephants’ teeth.  “Elsa?”  Elsa’s gazing fixedly at her plate now, smushing her fork into her yams.  Her mouth’s a wilted corkscrew.  She doesn’t say anything.

“Elsa’s staying here,” says Papa, gently.  “She has lessons.  And she doesn’t really want to go—she said so.  She can’t.  She’s busy.”

“Elsa?” Anna repeats.  She walks around the edge of the table toward her sister and Elsa shrinks away from her, rigid.  “Elsa,” says Anna, “please, it’ll be fun.  We’ll take a boat out to see the floating lanterns.  We’ll make purple pots like the one Mama brought back last time, please, you can study there, I bet there’s lots of libraries, please Elsa _please_ —”

Elsa pushes her plate away and jerks to her feet.  Her chair falls over too, just like Anna’s did.  It makes a harsh clacking sound on the floor and Elsa jumps and then something happens, something funny.  Elsa’s teacup shatters.  Anna’s seen cups break before—she’s not very graceful or careful, Mama’s always scolding her—but no one’s touching Elsa’s cup, no one knocks it.  It just breaks into pieces all by itself, little bits of porcelain flying out in a chipped pale starburst, and then a door slams and Elsa’s gone and there’s tea on the table, weird slushy chunks of it melting fast on the lacquer. 

“It was an old cup,” Papa says.  He and Mama clean up the mess, their hands darting in and out among the shards.  Papa’s wearing gloves just like Elsa’s and his fingers are hurried white hovering birds.  “Brittle.  The whole set should be replaced, probably.”  He tells Anna, “Your mother and Elsa and I all want to go, Anna, but we can’t.  We thought you’d like to anyway, even without us.”

“Yes, Papa.  Thank you.”

But later that night Anna lets herself out of her room and tiptoes down the hall to Elsa’s door.  She knocks.  Elsa says, “Not now, Anna,” and Anna feels a little coal of furious hurt light up in her chest.  She swallows the smoke of it, though, remembering the pyramids, the night bazaars, the camels.

“Elsa, please,” she says, “come with me.  Please come.  I know you wanna.  I _know_ you do.”  Elsa loves their game, loves the thread and the pins, loves planning out places to go and doing research beforehand.  She told Anna all about the frogs in Dutch Guiana with their bright, bright skin and their poison underneath—about India’s shrines and the tigers in the jungles, so numerous and so bold that the villagers there wear masks on the backs of their heads to try to seem like they’re always looking behind them.

“I can’t,” says Elsa.  “No.  Go back to bed, Anna.  I’m sorry.”

“But we could—”

“We _can’t_.”  Behind Elsa’s door a chair creaks and a book snaps shut, and Anna waits for more, her hands bunched up into fists, biting her lips so hard from the inside they twinge.  She waits a long time.  But there’s nothing else, no new excuse or reason, and the coal in Anna’s chest finally flares to flame. 

“You liar!” she cries out.  “Elsa, you—you dirty rotten _liar_ , you always said you wanted to go with me somewhere so _bad_ and now you can but you won’t and you lied!  You _LIED_!”  Her voice ratchets up to something that’s nearly a shriek.  “Why?  Why’d you say you wanted to go if you really didn’t?”

Silence.  Anna leans her forehead against Elsa’s door, eyes full of stinging tears.  Nightmares she had when she was littler made her grind her teeth while she slept.  She does it again now despite that the habit’s long dead, working her jaws together, the familiar friction growing an ache in her throat she lets loose in a sob, eventually.

“Elsa,” she asks, and oh the coal in her chest dims and flickers and dies, just like that, “do you hate me?”

There’s no silence this time.  There’s not even a pause.  “No,” Elsa says.  Her voice is close, so close, she’s right there on the other side of the door.

“Then why won’t you come with me?”

Anna can hear Elsa breathing, hoarse shivery puffs.  “I’m sorry,” Elsa says again.  “I just can’t.”

It’s dark in the hallway, and cold.  Anna’s barefoot and crying and when her own tears spatter across the tops of her feet, she jerks.  She sobs, lashes out, kicks the door.  It rattles in its frame and behind it Elsa cries out, pained or shocked, Anna can’t tell which.  Hot, sick shame floods through Anna parallel to fury.  An apology’s on her tongue the next second but she bites it back, she holds it tight behind her teeth and limps to her room with her arms clutched around herself.  She pulls all the pins off her map before she crawls into bed.  All the thread too.  She leaves the whole mess in a sharp tangle in her wastebasket.

The next morning Elsa doesn’t come downstairs to breakfast or even to the docks to tell her goodbye.

**Author's Note:**

> This will be a multi-chaptered work. Stay tuned!


End file.
